"Three years ago, a 23-year-old soldier walked off his base in Afghanistan and into the hands of the Taliban. Now he's a crucial pawn in negotiations to end the war. Will the Pentagon leave a man behind?"

"With the end in sight for Hamid Karzai's days in office as Afghanistan's president, members of his family are trying to protect their status, weighing how to hold on to power while secretly fighting among themselves for control of the fortune they have amassed in the last decade. "

"The U.S. has been financing both sides of the war in Afghanistan since 2001 as a startling percentage of foreign aid continues to flood Taliban coffers on a daily basis, according to Douglas A. Wissing in his new book, Funding the Enemy: How U.S. Taxpayers Bankroll the Taliban."

"Remember Milo Minderbinder, a fictional character in Joseph Heller's famous novel, Catch-22? Minderbinder is a war profiteer during World War II, "perhaps the best known of all fictional profiteers" in American literature. "

"The Afghan central bank's efforts to curb the exodus of money abroad are bearing fruit...The money flow-part of it suspected by U.S. and Afghan officials to be stolen foreign aid and proceeds from the drug trade-undermines the country's economy just as foreign forces depart. The cash flight also raises Western concerns about Afghanistan, already the source of most of the world's illicit opiates, becoming a global money-laundering center. "

"Today the news broke that United States officials, in a futile hope of quelling violence, have been party to a pernicious "catch-and-release" system that facilitated the secret release of high-level insurgent detainees, who are then free to strike at American forces again.

As American taxpayers try to process these indicators of a failing war, do they also know that their taxes are helping to bankroll the Taliban?"

Bin Laden has been dead for a year, but his strategy continues to work in Afghanistan. Well over a decade after he first formulated his economic "bleed until bankrupt" strategy, the United States continues to spend hundreds of billions of U.S. dollars in Afghanistan on generally fruitless counterinsurgency operations"

"An Army lieutenant colonel who accused senior U.S. officials of concealing bad news about the war in Afghanistan will receive the Ridenhour Prize for Truth-Telling on Wednesday at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.

Lt. Col. Daniel Davis laid out his concerns in "Truth, Lies, and Afghanistan,""

"According to journalist Douglas Wissing in his new book, Funding the Enemy, once the unholy alliance was forged between the brothers Karzai, rapacious warlords and incestuous multinational corporations, U.S. taxpayer dollars began to "lubricate an entire system of corruption that eventually extended to the Taliban.""

"Everyone knows a bit about the failed U.S. efforts in Afghanistan to win the hearts and minds of the people and to install a stable government, but in historian/journalist Doug Wissing's upcoming book, "Funding the Enemy: How U.S, Taxpayers Fund the Taliban," the stark details are laid bare. Wissing spent months in the country with U.S. soldiers and conducted hundreds of interviews. His conclusions are revelatory and scandalous. "

"The attacks that took place a week ago in Kabul received more than their fair share of media coverage. The same thing cannot be said for the parallel attacks launched by insurgents simultaneously in three other provincial capitals."

C-SPAN | Q&A: Douglas Wissing talked about Funding the Enemy: How U.S. Taxpayers Bankroll the Taliban, his book detailing his assertion that much of the U.S. taxpayer money spent in Afghanistan is diverted to the Taliban"

"Now, a new book by award winning, independent journalist Douglas Wissing, chronicles how the US has in effect, funded both sides of its war in Afghanistan. In "Funding the Enemy: How US Taxpayers Bankroll the Taliban," Wissing establishes a shocking pattern of policies in the Afghanistan war, and their consequences"

"(CNN) -- The past year has seen the number of CIA drone strikes in Pakistan plummet. In the first three months of 2012, there were 11, compared with 21 in the first three months of 2011 and a record 28 in the first quarter of 2010."

"In a brazen demonstration of its ability to hit some of the best defended targets in Kabul, the Taliban mounted its largest ever co-ordinated attack in 11 years of resistance to Afghanistan's post-2001 rulers."

"NATO forces are due to leave Afghanistan by the end of 2014, but the withdrawal poses a massive logistical challenge. The US and its allies are dependent on air hubs in Russia and authoritarian Central Asian republics to transport its troops and equipment home -- and getting those countries to play along is not always easy."